Anna Burns - Milkman

The second story put about about these aborting homosexual insurrectionists was that the eighth one, the woman who wasn’t from our district but the wise, knowledgeable facilitator from the downtown sister branch who’d come to visit our women fortnightly – to buck them up, to encourage with zeal and who brought with her each time mounds of pamphlets on the abundance of women’s issues – was from the other side’s religion and also from the country ‘over there’. Normally this would have been fine, completely all right given that, first of all, she was female, which meant of lesser significance as a potential threat to district paramilitary activity than would have been some visiting male person to the area. Two, she’d been invited into the area by seven local women which ordinarily would have been ample reference and recommendation for her. However, owing to these particular women being themselves hardly normal, any invitation they might extend would carry nowhere near the same weight as that of anyone else. This meant the eighth woman could no longer be allowed to enter, least not until vigorously vetted. After all, warned the grapevine, might she not be an issue woman really, a women’s libber really, but instead some slippery agent provocateur for the state? After a bit of exaggeration and the usual escalation of rumour, a spy, of course, became what she was. In the eyes of the community, and especially in the eyes of the paramilitaries, this eighth woman was an enemy out to entrap into informership our seven naïve and dotty women. So one Wednesday night-time the renouncers burst into the shed to take her away. They barged in – in Halloween masks, balaclavas, with guns, with a few secure enough in power and stature to eschew any type of facial covering – but all they found when they got inside were our seven women in their shawls and slippers, having tea and buns and discussing in chintz earnestness the ramifications of the massacre of the women and children by the yeomanry at the nineteenth-century Battle of Peterloo. On the walls around the shed, and overshadowing, also momentarily stunning the renouncers, loomed enormous, larger-than-life pin-ups of inspirational, prototypal past and present wonderwomen: the Pankhursts, Millicent Fawcett, Emily Davison, Ida Bell Wells, Florence Nightingale, Eleanor Roosevelt, Harriet Tubman, Mariana Pineda, Marie Curie, Lucy Stone, Dolly Parton – those sorts of women – but there was no eighth woman, because the other seven, attending carefully to the grapevine in our district, had warned their sister of this imminent danger and instructed her in no small terms not to come. All the same, the renouncers, recovering from the brain-shock of the false impression produced by additional, enormous women from down the centuries being present in that moment with our seven women, ransacked the tiny shed, which took a second, looking for the eighth woman. Then they warned the issue women not to have her back on pain of her being killed as a spy-agent with they, themselves, severely punished for aiding and abetting the state. Owing, however, to a burgeoning outlook that encompassed an attitude of confidence and entitlement, something snapped within the issue women and unexpectedly they declared they would not. What they meant was, they would not be dictated to, that in spite of the eighth woman probably never to return because the renouncers ruined everything, should she choose to do so, not only would they not reject her, they’d stand foursquare behind her and the renouncers themselves could go hang. Things were said then on both sides, with further threats from the renouncers and declamations on the ills of patriarchy and of pedagogy from the issue women. Finally, ‘Over our dead bodies,’ said the seven in a somewhat fatalistic ‘digging their own graves’ fashion, which of course, played straight into the renouncers’ hands. Unlike the traditional women from our district who, on occasion, would instinctively unite and rise up to put an end to some gone-mad political or district problem, these seven women – bold as they’d been in their inspired moment of standing up to the renouncers – didn’t and couldn’t constitute the same robust critical mass. So they said, ‘Over our dead bodies’ with the renouncers replying, ‘Okay then. Over your dead bodies’ and if it hadn’t been for the traditional women, including ma, getting to hear, then involving themselves in this matter, our particular sister branch of the international women’s movement – owing to the sudden and violent demise of all of its members – would there and then have come to an end. As it was, the district’s normal women did get to hear and, uniting once more, they threw themselves into action. This too, was in spite of reservations they held, not just of having to deal with what was, in its own amassment, a tenacious killing-machine of renouncers, but because of the third story doing the rounds about these tiresome issue women, one which impacted adversely and exasperatingly upon the traditional women themselves.

Women always broke the curfews. That would be the traditional women because until recently, there hadn’t been any newfangled branch of sisterhood women. This breaking of the curfews too, would be because the traditional women’s patience would have been stretched far enough. It would have been over-tried, over-tested and the subsequent snapping of it would be directed towards any group of men, any religion, any side of the water, setting up rules and regulations, overreaching themselves with their rules and regulations, expecting everyone else too – meaning women – to go along with the preposterousness of the silliness they had concocted as rationale in their heads. Basically, it was the toybox mentality, the toy trains in the attic, the toy soldiers on the toy battlefield and, in the case of the state and the military, the particular toy of choice that they’d get out of the box every so often was curfews where the rules were, if you broke one without a permit after eighteen hundred hours and sometimes after just sixteen hundred hours, without fear or favour, without respect for station, on sight you would be shot. So it was bad enough having to deal with your own particular brand of paramilitaries with all their touchy rules and pedantic expectations. But when also you had to factor in the other side with their equally ridiculous runners and riders, it was out of the question really, that the traditional woman’s forbearance would not, in these circumstances, snap. So it would snap – because life was going on – children to be fed, nappies to be changed, housework to be done, shopping to be got in, political problems, best as could be managed, skirted around or in some other way accommodated. So patience would snap then, united, and in spite of the police and military poring over and adjusting beloved touches to tactics and game-plans before setting out with rifles and loudhailers to make sure nobody was breaking the curfew, these women would break the curfew by taking off their aprons, putting on their coats, shawls, scarves and with the bush telegraph already up and running, they’d go out their doors in their hundreds and deliberately, and permitless, and after eighteen hundred hours or just sixteen hundred hours, encumber the pavements, the streets, every patch of disallowed curfew territory, amply spreading themselves all around. Not just themselves either. With them would be their children, their screaming babies, their housepets of assorted dogs, rabbits, hamsters and turtles. Also they’d be wheeling their prams and carrying their pennants, their banners, their placards and shouting, ‘CURFEW’S OVER! EVERYBODY IS TO COME OUT! CURFEW’S OVER!’, thereby inviting all in the area who weren’t already out, to come out, so that everybody could enter into state defiance and every time so far when the traditional women had done this, when they’d reclaimed sanity, the police and the military would find the latest curfew, right before their eyes, had stopped. To shoot up a district of women, children, prams and goldfish otherwise, to run them through with swords much as one might like to, would not look good, would look grave, sexist, unbalanced, not only in the glare of the critical side of the home media, but also in the eyes of the international media. So, curfew over, the military and the state would go back to the playbox to find out what else might be in there, with the traditional women – after further obligatory banner-waving, picketing, pressure protests and interviews – returning home in haste, emptying the streets in seconds, all to get in to get the evening tea on.